Maybe that’s what this community wants, which is fine (just not for me).

… Judging from the number of downvotes on this post (and my personal opinion): No, the community doesn’t want it either.

If this user/bot were committed to posting this, but stayed with a single user (which I could block), I’d be fine with that. If they posted weekly, I’d tolerate it.

… but creating new users and spamming multiple channels with content people really don’t want to see: that’s just trolling (or ignorance).

… and that was the last Linux version of Skype.

This is a very cool concept, but has anyone actually gotten this to read as a qr code?

I’ve tried a bunch of apps without any luck.

That’s a very clever solution. But it’s really convient to create a login in your phone and immediate switch to your laptop and login.

I’d used KeepassXC + Nextcloud to sync for ~4 years.

Then I switched to Bitwarden client + self-hosted Bitwarden Server/Vaultwarden for ~2 years and I haven’t looked back.

The problem you’ll face with KeepassXC + any syncing mechanism is that conflicts will happen. Meaning, you’ll make a change on your cellphone, your internet has a hiccup or stops working. Then you make a different change on you desktop. When everything is synced, you’ll be left with a KeePass conflict file that you need to fix. This might be fine if you immediately notice it, but if you stumble upon a conflict file from a month ago - good luck merging the differences.

Bitwarden client + Vaultwarden has improved my password experience radically. I have phones, laptops, browsers, etc all talking to Vaultwarden. Any conflicts are handled automagically by the clients. Everything “just works” in offline mode (meaning I can add/update credentials while offline and it’ll update the server whenever it can - without needing to do any mental gymnastics).

I can share passwords with friends and family without needing to share everything. Plus, as my instance is self-hosted, my family can get “emergency access” (would be a “premium feature”) to my passwords if something unfortunate happens to me. Plus, requesting emergency access is pretty easy to do, for non-tech people.

edit: a word

+1 for this.

Just be transparent and honest with your Team.

Explain to them how the actual budget is out of your direct control. However, also explain what knobs you and your IC can influence (for example being more visible with your Team/IC’s accomplishments at an organizational level).

Also many companies have a “flight risk” box, when calculating raises. Explain to your IC’s that you can hit this checkbox (if the IC wants), but it’s pretty much a onetime use button.

Don’t be afraid to rock the organizational boat. They won’t hold it against you, as you’re just doing your job. Your goal, first and foremost, is to get the most you can out of your Team and money is a good motivator.

If you need other “cheap” motivators:

• have the Team take some time off (paid or unpaid) and watch/stream a movie, with the mic on. Encourage people to trash talk the movie. If you’re in I.T. Office Space is a classic.
• for ~$40 / year, you can get a subscription to Boardgame Arena. Only one person needs a paid account (so they can create games and invite people). It’s all online and they have quiet a selection of games to choose from. King of Tokyo is one of our favorites.
• Introduce “Fantastic Friday”: this is a bit controversial with upper management, but works great with my Teams in the past. Basically, reserve a Friday (bi-weekly/monthly) where your Team can explore whatever topics they want as long as they’ve already finished their current workload. Usually, that disclaimer isn’t necessary, as people will usually want to get their normal work done. The pitch for upper management (if they ask) is that Fantastic Friday is a tool (ie: a canary in the coalmine) to help the Team create accurate estimates and deliver with more reliability. If they over commit, then that Fantastic Friday can be repurposed as a day to “catch-up” (while the Team can understand/refocus on why they didn’t get a Fantastic Friday and pivot accordingly). Furthermore, Fantastic Friday was often used to explore more “outside the box” ideas that actually boosted the Team/companies productivity, but we would not have normally persuded because it was outside our current task’s scope.

edit: added more about Fantastic Friday and fix grammar.

Whatever they’ve been doing the last decade hasn’t been right.

That depends on which side of the wealth gap you’re on, right?

The old guard has to die off or step aside first.

I don’t think “dieing off” or “stepping aside” is going to be the catalyst for change.

What will happen is that the old guards will groom the next generation in the playbook’s they’ve been (successfully) using and refining for the last decade. Those groomed players will then be their successors.

The only way we’ll get the “change and improvement” is if we (as a society) say “this is enough, you’ve gone too far”. However, given the levels of apathy and the recent election outcome, I’d say the American People will need to suffer more, before they’re shaken out of their apathetic stupor.

The thing that unites most of the “racist Nazis” is desperation.

Especially, in the U.S. the erosion of the middle class is forcing families to be either upper or lower class.

The lower class families are struggling and have been struggling for quite sometime. They experience day to day, the struggles of keeping their jobs, keeping food on the table, not to mention trying to fulfill the dream of having a holiday.

These people see “illegal” immigrants working in the fields on their way to their minimum wage job. They hear on the news how “more jobs are being created”, yet they’re still stuck in their dead-end job and they’re the lucky ones. Their friend Pete’s been in between jobs for a few years now. Pete can’t get a job 'cause these immigrants work for pennies on the dollar and Pete’s got a family to feed.

They’re all desperate, they’re cornered. Then they become hateful. They see anyone who is not in the same situation as them is “the enemy”. The people who are stealing a piece of their pie (ie the illegal immigrants) need to be stopped, but they aren’t because corporate greed is funding this.

Then on the news, you hear about a messiah. He promises change, he understands the injustice you face on a daily basis. “The System” that claims “everything is fine and is only getting better” is fuming about the messiah. Your distrust of the System, combined with their knee-jerk reaction, makes you wonder “hmmm… maybe this is the change I need… any change would be better than the stagnation we’re currently facing”.

So, they go and vote for a wannabe dictator.

disclaimer: these are not my opinions, but merely my empathy (I know of these people) . This is also a similar sense of desperation that lead to World War 2.

Lemm.ee: It’s the Switzerland of the fediverse. ;)

The Operations Team are a stand-up group. Their focus is on delivering stability.

You’ll basically get access to all content (and all “features”, like up-vote and down-vote - I’m looking at you beehaw).

What I’ve heard from other people is that they want automagic curated content… so you won’t find that a lemm.ee, but for me - I’m happy to find the content that’s meaningful to me.

This is loosely related to “online experience” (as you’ve covered most of the “tech tips”) :

When choosing a movie don’t watch the trailers, instead (blindly) watch what’s popular. (obviously, if you’re into niche genres - this won’t work.)

I’ve found Trackt is a good place to understand recent trends (and it just shows film posters). Then I’ll go to IMDB, maybe read the summary, but I always read the first/popular user review and decide if it’s worth my time and money.

The first/popular user review usually doesn’t contain spoilers.

Since I’ve actively avoided trailers and spoilers, my enjoyment for films has nearly doubled - even for “bad movies” (I probably wouldn’t have watched otherwise). It’s such a shame that a 2 minute trailer often shows many/most of the highlights of the film.

There has to be a better way to keep the strengths of federating without partitioning the community smaller and smaller until there is no community left.

Can you imagine Lemmy with a similar amount of Reddit users? Anytime you’d post, you’d have to replicate it between X number of instances (for visibility). Conversations would be fragemented and duplicated, votes would be duplicated. To me this almost sounds like “work”…

There has to be something better.

For example, instead of “every instance is an island”. Meaning the current hierarchy is “instance” - > “community” - > “post” - > “threads”. We could instead have “community (ie: asklemmy)” - > “post (ie: this post)” - > “instance (Lemmy.ml, Lemmy.world, etc)” - > “threads (this comment)”.

From a technical perspective, it would mean that each instance would replicate the community names and posts. Which is already beginning done (this post is a perfect example), but as long as each instance would share a unique identifier to associate the two communities/posts as “the same thing” (and this could simply be the hash of the community /post name). Everything else would be UX. Each instance would take ownership of the copy of the community and post, which means they could moderate it according to their standards.

I fixed the link. For some reason the Lemmy Client (Voyager) keeps generating ‘.ml’ links (even though I’m on Lemm.ee)

This whole identical thread really confused Voyager, I thought I was seeing double.

Off-topic: Lemmy really needs better crosspost functionality.

Lemmy is a small group of people, let’s not divide it further by having the exact same conversation in two (or more) places.

edit: Fixed the link.

I don’t have anything meaningful to add, other than my sincere gratitude to you for posting this.

I haven’t laughed so hard in a good while.

The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

Actually, with enough interactions from different people (ie: enough data points) Lemmy should be able to determine if a comment brings value to the conversation (either positive or negative) or if it’s noise that should be ignored (and prioritized lower).

If you have 4 comments:

1. Has 100 upvotes (in total)
2. Another has 100 downvote (in total)
3. Another has 50 upvotes and 50 downvote (100 in total with a 0 sum)
4. The last was a new comment with 0 votes.

It’s obvious that 1 and 3 are providing more to the conversation than 2. 4 is a bit of an outlier, but probably provides more value than 2.

Regarding 3: The challenge would be that there’s a low chance that there will be such a wide margin of upvotes/downvotes. Due to the hive mind, the voting will probably look like 30 upvotes and 130 downvotes. So, there would need to be a weight accordingly, so those fewer upvotes had a greater impact (in terms of sorting and scoring comments)

Reddit has a “sort by controversial” algorithm that seems to be missing from Lemmy (or maybe it’s hidden in the “what’s hot" - I haven’t looked at the code).

It would be awesome (and resource intensive) if Lemmy could provide the federated instances with custom sorting algorithms. It would allow federated instances to be unique, provide some playful competition, and given the open source nature of Lemmy - I’m sure these algorithms would be open sourced, which would improve the entire Lemmy ecosystem as a whole.

Herbie?

One of your questions I didn’t see answered:

And after doing my research I found out americans file taxes every year. I haven’t done it the last 18 years of working. Should I just not file?

You have two choices:

1. Full Disclosure : you tell the IRS, you haven’t filled and ask them to help you rectify the situation. This could mean penalties and fines for filing late or based on your situation, they might let is slide (as it was an honest oversight). Once you’ve gone through this, then your back in the IRS’ good graces (assuming you still file your taxes and fbar annually)

2. A “stealth” disclosure : (there’s a better name but I forgot was it’s called) basically, you just start to file your 2023 taxes and pretend that nothing has happened during the last 18 years… if you do this for the next 5 years (or 7 years?) and the IRS does not say anything, then you’re back in the IRS good graces (they can only penalize you for x number of years) . But if the IRS decides to contact you, then they could throw the book at you (more than if you went with option 1).

Ultimately, it’s a gamble with a risk. However, if you’ve recently learned of your citizenship and got a passport. I think it’s quite plausible to get some lienency, both for the full disclosure and the stealth disclosure.

Well… there is also Eritrea, a small country in West Africa.

The U. S. Taxes is based on the country you’re living in. If there are double taxation treaties between the two countries (ie: Europe and the U. S.), then the IRS would tax you on the amount you’ve earned over a certain limit (it was 100k usd, but I think was increased). Meaning, if you earned 110k usd, you’d be taxes on the 10k. If you earn less then 100k, you’d pay no U. S. Taxes.

If there isn’t a treaty, which is often the case in countries that tax their citizens less than the U. S. , then you’d basically be charged taxes in the U. S. (based on your worldwide income) minus whatever you paid the country you’re living in.

OP read this, they’re absolutely right - lawyer up!

Cause in the U. S. if you want to renounce your U. S. citizenship, you must settle your debts - which includes filing your U. S. Taxes.

… and yes, as a U. S. Citizen you need to file U. S. Taxes *even if you’ve never set foot in the U. S. *.

Note: there are double taxation laws between the U. S. and Germany, which prevent you from needing to pay taxes in U. S. (up to 100k / year or so), but you still must file them.

Also, as a U. S. Citizen, you’ll need to file annually a FBAR with the IRS. This is basically a disclosure to the IRS that you have non-u.s. bank accounts (that exceed, in total, 20k usd / year).

The point being is that, in theory, there could be fines for not doing this, which (in theory) you would have to pay before being allowed to renounce your citizenship.

In practice, the IRS is pretty approachable - so you probably won’t have an issue, but you’ll definitely want decide if you want to keep the U. S. Citizenship (and the work associated with it: annual taxes and fbar) or renounce it.

The (only) upshot of filing U. S. taxes abroad if you have kids is that you qualify for a Child Tax Credit. Which amounts to 1000 usd / kid / year (I don’t know if the kids need to have U. S. Citizenship or not)

STOP! You’re scaring the children!